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Gestures in podcasting
Podcasts are an audio-based genre. As someone who works with gesture, and often talks about gesture on podcasts, I’m acutely aware of the lack of visuals in podcasting. Audio-only communication is a radical departure from the way humans have communicated for most of human history, and while it is possible to communicate just using speech, this doesn’t mean that gestures are not contributing; people podcasting, doing radio or speaking on the phone will still gesticulate as they speak.
Occasionally I’ll notice that gestures ‘break through’, and will be explicitly mentioned as the person is talking. I’ve given three examples that I’ve noticed in podcasts, but I’m sure there are many more. I also have a hunch that gestures that are specifically mentioned during a podcast are of a specific kind, in that they’re important enough in the mind of the speaker to be worthy of comment. My guess is that these are gestures that are particularly illustrative, or they’re backchanneling gestures done by the other participants in the conversation.
If you also hear examples of people speaking about gesture in a podcast, let me know! I’ve set up a very short google form to collect examples: https://forms.gle/f1LbWEAWUTcX9uFq5
One of the biggest challenges of collecting examples of this is the fact that many podcasts still don’t make transcripts available, so it’s hard to pull together a large corpus to search. I hope to eventually do something with this, but if you’d like to use this as a research project, please get in touch!
Example 1: The Culture Episode: The Kardashians: Saying goodbye to America’s Royal Family (July 2nd 2021)
Brodie Lancaster, while talking about the mutual rise of the Kardashian family and the popularity of Kimye: “I’m making a motion of like braiding something together” (timecode: 28:54) [no transcript] Listening to this episode of The Culture on a long walk, it was this example that made me realise this was a thing I’d been thinking about long enough that it was time to turn it into a post. Example 2: The Vocal Fries Episode: Between Iraq and a Hard Place Transcript (12th December 2019)
Zach Jaggers: “We also see cases where there’s a loanword from another language used in a borrowing language where it’s not because there was some kind of, quote – hand quotes. Sorry, I gesture a lot. [Laughs]” [transcript]
In this episode there’s a string of examples where Jaggers uses tone of voice to indicate quotation, but also overtly marks that he’s doing handquotes as well. I like the reflexivity of acknowledging the limits of podcasting in this example.
Example 3: Lingthusiasm Episode: Why spelling is hard — but also hard to change (June 20th 2019)
Gretchen McCulloch: “This is what the primary function of the French accent circonflexe, which is the one that looks like a little hat – I’m making the little hat sign with my hands as I say this because that was how we always talked about it in school is you have to make the hat sign with your hands” [transcript]
Gretchen and I gesture all the time while we’re recording Lingthusiasm, but here Gretchen felt particularly compelled to share her gesture with everyone, because it’s so much a part of the story of the circonflexe for her.
Thoughts for now
Each of these examples shows the person who is speaking feels compelled to draw attention to what their gestures are contributing to the content of what they are saying. I’m sure there are other ways in which gestures manifest themselves in the final product of a podcast. There are also other features of face-to-face communication that have the potential to make themselves known in podcasts and other voice-only media. Liveshow audiences are something that particularly come to mind, especially since there has been so little opportunity for live recordings in the last 18 months.
Cite this blog post
All original content on Superlinguo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If this post has inspired you to think and write about gestures in podcasts, please let me know! You can also cite this blog post:
Gawne, Lauren. 2021. Gestures in podcasting. Superlinguo. https://www.superlinguo.com/post/659622302480318464/gestures-in-podcasting Accessed DATE.
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